MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS: WHAT ARE THESE GOALS by Efe ÖRENCİK

MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS: WHAT ARE THESE GOALS by Efe ÖRENCİK. Hey, It’s me your favourite MUNTurkey.com writer and this is my second article Firstly I want to start my article with why I choose this title to my article. I choose it because most of MUN’ers knows just SDG’s (Sustainable Development Goals) and they don’t know MDGs (Millennium Development Goals). I wrote this article because I want to you introduce them to their aims.

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions.

On 23 September 2013, Ban Ki-mun (the Secretary-General) hosted a high-level forum to catalyze and accelerate further action to achieve the MDGs and enrich the deliberations of the General Assembly and beyond. The forum focused on concrete examples of scaling up success and identifying further opportunities. Additional commitments to boost MDG achievement were announced, bringing the total to more than $2.5 billion.

On 25 September 2013, John W. Ashe (the President of the UN General Assembly) hosted a special event to follow up on efforts made towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). At the Special Event towards achieving the MDGs, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented to the Member States in his report entitled “A Life of Dignity for All”. In the outcome document adopted by the Member States, world leaders renewed their commitment to meet the MDG’s targets and agreed to hold a high-level Summit in September 2015 to adopt a new set of Goals building on the achievements of the MDGs.

Target 1.A: Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1.25 a day• The target of reducing extreme poverty rates by half was met five years ahead of the 2015 deadline.• More than 1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990.• At the global level, more than 800 million people are still living in extreme poverty.

Target 1.B: Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people• Globally, 300 million workers lived below the $1.25 a day poverty line in 2015.• The global employment-to-population ratio – the proportion of the working-age population that is employed – has fallen from 62 percent in 1991 to 60 percent in 2015, with an especially significant downturn during the global economic crisis of 2008/2009.• Only four in ten young women and men aged 15-24 are employed in 2015, compared with five in ten in 1991.

Target 2.A: Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling• Enrolment in primary education in developing regions reached 91 percent in 2015, up from 83 percent in 2000.• In 2015, 57 million children of primary school age were out of school.• Among youth aged 15 to 24, the literacy rate has improved globally from 83 percent to 91 percent between 1990 and 2015, and the gap between women and men has narrowed.• In the developing regions, children in the poorest households are four times as likely to be out of school as those in the richest households.

Target 3.A: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015• The developing countries as a whole have achieved the target to eliminate gender disparity in primary, secondary and tertiary education.• Globally, about three-quarters of working-age men participate in the labour force, compared to half of the working-age women.• Women make up 41 percent of paid workers outside of agriculture, an increase from 35 percent in 1990.• The average proportion of women in parliament has nearly doubled over the past 20 years.• Women continue to experience significant gaps in terms of poverty, labour market and wages, as well as participation in private and public decision-making.

Target 4.A: Reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate• Between 1990 and 2015, the global under-five mortality rate has declined by more than half, dropping from 90 to 43 deaths per 1000 live births.• Between 1990 and 2015, the number of deaths in children under five worldwide declined from 12.7 million in 1990 to almost 6 million in 2015.• Children in rural areas are about 1.7 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday as those in urban areas.• Children of mothers with secondary or higher education are almost three times as likely to survive as children of mothers with no education.• While Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s highest child mortality rate, the absolute decline in child mortality has been the largest over the past two decades.• Every day in 2015, 16,000 children under five continue to die, mostly from preventable causes. Child survival must remain a focus of the new sustainable development agenda.

Target 5.A: Reduce by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio• Since 1990, the maternal mortality ratio has been cut nearly in half, and most of the reduction occurred since 2000.• More than 71 percent of births were assisted by skilled health personnel globally in 2014, an increase from 59 percent in 1990.• Globally, there were an estimated 289,000 maternal deaths in 2013.

Target 6.A: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS• New HIV infections fell by approximately 40 percent between 2000 and 2013.• Globally, an estimated 35 million people were still living with HIV in 2013.• More than 75 percent of the new infections in 2013 occurred in 15 countries.• Worldwide, an estimated 0.8 percent of adults aged 15 to 49 were living with HIV in 2013.

Target 6.B:Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it• By June 2014, 13.6 million people living with HIV were receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) globally, an increase from 800,000 in 2003.• In 2013 alone, the number of people receiving ART rose by 1.9 million in the developing regions.• ART averted 7.6 million deaths from AIDS between 1995 and 2013.• Antiretroviral medicines to treat HIV were delivered to 12.1 million people in developing regions in 2014.

Target 7.A: Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources• Forests are a safety net, especially for the poor, but they continue to disappear at an alarming rate.• An increase in afforestation, a slight decrease in deforestation and the natural expansion of forests have reduced the net loss of forest from an average of 8.3 million hectares annually in the 1990s to an average of 5.2 million hectares annually between 2000 and 2010.• Between 1990 and 2012, global emissions of carbon dioxide increased by over 50 percent.• Ozone-depleting substances have been virtually eliminated, and the ozone layer is expected to recover by the middle of this century.

Target 7.B:Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss• Protected ecosystems covered 15.2 percent of the land and 8.4 percent of coastal marine areas worldwide by 2014.

Target 8.A:Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system• Official development assistance from developed countries increased by 66 percent in real terms between 2000 and 2014, reaching $135.2 billion.

Target 8.C: Address the special needs of landlocked developing countries and small island developing States• Projections indicate that a 2.5 percent increase in country programmable aid in 2015, mainly through disbursements by multilateral agencies, will most benefit least developed and other low-income countries.

Target 8.D:Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries• In 2013, the debt burden of developing countries was 3.1 percent, a major improvement over the 2000 figure of 12.0 percent.

Target 8.E:In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries• From 2007 to 2014, on average, generic medicines were available in 58 percent of public health facilities in low-income and lower-middle-income countries.

Target 8.F: In cooperation with the private sector, make available benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications• Globally, the proportion of the population covered by a 2G mobile-cellular network grew from 58 percent in 2001 to 95 percent in 2015.• Internet use penetration has grown from just over 6 percent of the world’s population in 2000 to 43 percent in 2015. 3.2 billion people are linked to a global network of content and applications.

These are the aims and goals of the MDG’s. And last but not least, I hope you enjoyed reading my article.

NOTE: All l have taken the information and the banner picture from UN’s website. But we re-edited the information.